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Even when told not to, Windows 10 doesn't stop talking to Microsoft

arstechnica.co.uk

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Re: Even when told not to, Windows 10 doesn't stop talking to Microsoft

#141

Post by clessg »

edgyswingset wrote: post #84
inversionOf wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I hardly think you're asking with any sincerity, sharing every keystroke, local system search, application activity, wifi passwords, and so on is over the top . Making that the default, instead of a value-add that you pitch, was profoundly poorly considered.

> profoundly poorly considered For the handful of people who care deeply about data collection, yeah. For the rest of the 900+ million, it's really not a concern. Edit: I know it sucks to hear, but your concerns about privacy are hardly shared among the general populous.

Every nontechnical person I told about this seemed quite shocked to learn about it and wanted to know how to avoid having their privacy invaded.

I really don't think most people expect their operating system to be spying on them.

It's one thing if you're on gmail.com or facebook.com and those sites collect info about you. People expect that. Most people probably don't expect Microsoft to install a keylogger on their computer. (Not that Google and Facebook are in the right, but I don't think they are equivalent.)

Re: Even when told not to, Windows 10 doesn't stop talking to Microsoft

#142

Post by PythonicAlpha »

kuschku wrote: post #99
drdaeman wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet, I believe he has a point, and he had pointed to the very core problem. If you hadn't read the EULA/ToS/Privacy Policy/etc, but had consented to those (by clicked "agree" in case of click-wrap packaging thingy), the fact is Microsoft is very unlikely to be held accountable if their actions are perfectly conforming to the agreement you had agreed without even reading. Something is surely not right with this whole…

EULA, ToS, etc do not apply in Europe if they contain terms that the user can not reasonably expect. An OS sharing all your data even with snooping disabled falls under this regulation, and multiple EU data privacy officials are already investigating and preparing a case.

Could be, but also could not.

Microsoft once already was under EU investigation and the whole thing was settled with minimal efforts for Microsoft (the only thing I remember was, that they had to provide a browser selection screen).

When the OS sends encrypted data to their servers, who will prove, that their is an offense made? Even when the terms are troublesome in the EU, they will just make some cosmetic changes to the terms for Europe. There are other terms, that are not valid in the EU, but Microsoft did even not change them yet (as much I know), even when it gets problems to enforce them on the courts.

Privacy might be a issue in Europe, more than in the US, but don't forget: the privacy officers in Germany have nearly no power, and are laughed at or ignored by most politicians.

Microsoft has nearly nothing to fear, IMHO from the EU, so long the US jurisdiction is also holding its peace. In Germany/the EU, nobody has the guts to fence to hard against a large US corporation -- but that is my opinion.

It would be nice, when the EU would act on it, but I don't trust it!

Re: Even when told not to, Windows 10 doesn't stop talking to Microsoft

#143

Post by oxide »

cryptophreak wrote: post #130

Of course this is true. Companies make money by spying on their customers. Did we really imagine that flipping the “Stop making money” preference was going to work?

well...yes. I fully expect when I opt out of something, anything, that it isn't still doing what I just thought I opted out of.

that's probably my fault for being so naive.

Re: Even when told not to, Windows 10 doesn't stop talking to Microsoft

#144

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

sliverstorm wrote: post #129
irq-1 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I don't know what it's doing, how can I trust it? It's not enough to examine software: if you don't trust the company , then anything they say or promise is worthless. Automatic updates can change anything, including the TOS! This is the same company that sells a 1984-Telescreen (XBox) with an always-on camera and microphone. _NSA shouldn't be forgotten. Oracle likes to tout Java as GPL, but what does that matte…

Or as I like to put it, at the end of the day you have to trust someone, somewhere in the chain. In the case of software vendors, you have to trust the vendor. You cannot independently verify everything. You do not have the expertise nor the bandwidth. Edit: and if you have the software audited, are you not then trusting the auditor?

True, but there's no logical fallacy in writing off companies and products if they're consistently untrustworthy.

Re: Even when told not to, Windows 10 doesn't stop talking to Microsoft

#145

Post by PythonicAlpha »

Silhouette wrote: post #122
PythonicAlpha wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, you can try with any contract -- and go to trial. But I have seen worse contracts and the companies are coming threw with it most of the time, but maybe in your country the juristic system is better and not the size of the company or the number of lawyers are important. I for my side, would not bet on winning a trial against Microsoft in such a case.

In reality it probably wouldn't be an individual customer against Microsoft anyway. It would be someone like the national data protection regulator or European authorities, acting on behalf of the population as a whole, and they would probably be looking at the actual behaviour of Microsoft and whether it violated data protection laws. If Microsoft attempted to argue that weasel words in their terms permitted their b…

It would be nice, if it would be that easy.

See my answer here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10055866

Can you name examples, where big corporations got "Serious" penalties for privacy issues? I don't know any. I only know, that in Germany, we always say, how important the issue is, but at least under our current government, privacy issues and the officers are laughed at by the big politicians. They might say different, but that is the reality (in Germany, everything is double-correct, until you look under the carpet!).

The trouble is, besides the juristic impact here, when you go on this level, it gets political and many influential German politicians don't want to mess with the US and with big corporations (their motto: "Sozial ist, was Arbeit schafft!"), particularly in the current government! And don't think, that the EU is an independent entity -- the German government likes to make it look as such, but in reality, the EU does nothing, what the governments of the most influential countries do not want.

(I also don't think, that the current German government will change soon -- it is a mess!)

Re: Even when told not to, Windows 10 doesn't stop talking to Microsoft

#147

Post by aluhut »

personjerry wrote: post #123
aluhut wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that it is not an user friendly solution. It will only help those people who do have several OS running or are capable of understanding. The privacy settings that do not work were pretty good hidden already and many are scared away already. This second level is even worse. What we need is a simple tool where you set check boxes to fix it all. That would be a solution for the target audience.

Well in the case of the Tor or VPN users, I suspect most of them are probably not the typical user you're implying, and at least have some IT skill. In the case of other users, I'm not sure because I do not fully understand it, but it seems like this would not be necessary?

I'm sure if they could easily decide whats necessary, many would secure themselves.

Re: Even when told not to, Windows 10 doesn't stop talking to Microsoft

#148

Post by jazzyk »

TsomArp wrote: post #58
thescrewdriver wrote: post #36

Until recently Microsoft had taken a far more reasonable approach to privacy than say Google. Anyone remember the MS "gmail man" ads mocking the way Google inspects your email when MS doesn't? It seems that MS under Nadella has taken a decidedly Google-like turn away from privacy with Windows 10. MS seems as hell-bent as Google and Facebook to collect as much data about you as possible, even if it is for seemingly in…

An algorithm reading your email to look for words to server better ads is hardly spying imho. I rather see ads of things that interest me than ads for casinos. And I'm hardly a MS lover.

Unless, of course they are looking for the words "male", "escort", "date" in e-mails from a (most likely Republican) Senator, married with kids :-)

Joking aside, you realize what you just have said is naive? Any form of privacy invasion can be - and eventually will be - used for nefarious purposes.

Re: Even when told not to, Windows 10 doesn't stop talking to Microsoft

#149

Post by ams6110 »

blackbeard wrote: post #5
bsilvereagle wrote: post #2

> And finally, some traffic seems quite impenetrable. We configured our test virtual machine to use an HTTP and HTTPS proxy (both as a user-level proxy and a system-wide proxy) so that we could more easily monitor its traffic, but Windows 10 seems to make requests to a content delivery network that bypass the proxy. Does this mean a Win10 machine setup to use something like Tor will leak the user's actual IP back to…

I've been on Windows 10 for a couple of days now. VPN traffic doesn't leak if the default route is the VPN interface. I tried it and my firewall went silent apart from the tunnel. I have absolutely no fucking idea what it is sending out though. It's always talking to something. I've turned everything off that is documented and use a local account and remove-appxpackage'd everything. Sorry but this release is a write…

I'm just about to untangle myself from my last client where I work with MS stuff. And I'm never touching it again.
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